Refugees Magazine Issue 126 (Women) – Fighting for equal rights...

Do refugee women get a fair deal? There's been progress, but there's still a long way to go

It was another tragic flood of refugees, like so many which have scarred the African continent in the last few decades – tens of thousands of terrified Angolans fleeing war in their homeland, trudging across a battered and savage landscape in search of safety. Neighboring Zaire, a land of potentially fabulous wealth also brought to its knees by the despotic rule of the late President Mobutu Sese Seko, nevertheless responded kindly, as so many African nations do, to the newly arrived refugees.

Food was distributed and large plots of land earmarked for the Angolans. The criteria for assistance in the 1980s was simple: It was allocated to all "able-bodied male heads of household."

Field officer Christine Mougne was appalled. "Aren't there any refugee women here?" she recalls asking her colleagues. "It hadn't entered anybody's mind that 30 percent of the refugees were women."

"We knocked some heads together," Mougne said. "It took time, but eventually the women were also given help."

Another crisis, another decade, but the mindset remained the same. As armies of Kurds fled the mayhem of Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War in 1991, UNHCR emergency officer John Telford remembered that after a period of utter chaos, an orderly food distribution system was put into place for the displaced civilians.

Unfortunately, all the appointed food marshals were local men and little aid reached any women.

"Had that group (of women) stood out in some way – visually or physically, because of their ethnic background, or a religious difference, or whatever – we would have made sure they got food," he said in an interview shortly after the operation. "But because they were women, it didn't even occur to us. It didn't even occur to me, I have to admit – to my shame."

The story was similar for women staff entering the humanitarian field. Male personnel far outnumbered women, who were often 'invisible' at the higher levels of aid organizations. One new recruit interested in gender issues was told by a female colleague, "You have to accept that entering the world of social services (for women) you will become a pariah within UNHCR."

In any civilian exodus, women and children normally make up an estimated 75 percent of a refugee population. But despite that telling statistic, prevailing attitudes should, perhaps, not have come as a particular shock. After all, the 1951 Geneva Convention – the Magna Carta of international refugee law – was crafted by an all-male panel and defined a refugee as someone with a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group and political opinion. The founding fathers did not deliberately omit persecution based on gender – it was not even considered.

VOICES: "Women are left out of everything. We do not participate in planning or designing programs which are aimed at us. We are second-class citizens when it comes to food, water and shelter distributions. We remain the world's invisible refugees."

In later decades the fight to give women a better deal, both in the wider world and on the humanitarian scene, progressed fitfully in many parts of the world.

The situation began to change for refugee women in the late 1980s and accelerated through the last decade of the 20th century, but many questions remain relevant today: How much real advancement has been made? How quickly is progress being achieved? Is this good enough? What more needs to be done?

To be sure, there have been breakthroughs and achievements in many areas. Multiple policy statements and gender guidelines were adopted by the U.N. refugee agency and other organizations. As long ago as 1985 UNHCR's Executive Committee endorsed its first Conclusion on Refugee Women and International Protection and three years later organized its first comprehensive Consultations on Refugee Women. In 1991 Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women followed and the agency regularly reviews and updates key policies.

In 1984 the European Parliament approved what was then a revolutionary resolution asking member states to consider women who ran afoul of religious or social taboos as a "particular social group" for the purpose of determining whether they qualified for refugee status.

Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and other countries followed suit with their own specific guidelines.

The Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted in 1998, giving it power to adjudicate a wide spectrum of offenses including rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and forced pregnancy. Last year, the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia handed down its first conviction for rape as a crime against humanity against three Bosnian Serb officers (Refugees N° 122).

Early in the new millennium a U.N. resolution committed governments to protect women from the abuses of war and include them in subsequent peace talks. A follow up Security Council statement reaffirmed its strong support for the inclusion of women in "negotiations and implementation of peace accords, constitutions and strategies for resettlement and rebuilding."

VOICES: "When a rebel broke into our house (in Sierra Leone), my mother was asked to give one of her children up or else the entire family would be killed. My mother gave me up. The rebels took me with them and on our way to their camp I was raped by seven of them. I was held for one year. After I escaped, I asked myself 'Who will help me now?'"

This high-level activism spawned hundreds of special women's projects in the field. Suddenly there was funding, mainly from wealthy western nations and private organizations such as the Ted Turner Foundation. The new money helped provide better healthcare, improved food and water supplies, increased literacy and skills training, programs to study and combat sexual violence and the curse of sexual genital mutilation. Other projects helped women begin their own small businesses and become actively involved in refugee camp committees or other political, social and economic groups once they returned home.

A particularly effective program was developed in Central America to help an estimated 45,000 Guatemalans who fled a civil war in the 1980s and sought refuge in Mexico. When women demanded a voice in negotiations to return home, UNHCR funded projects to develop women's rights, combat their illiteracy and improve health services and leadership skills.

Women were directly involved in repatriation negotiations and among the concessions they won was recognition, for the first time, of the principle of equal ownership of both private and communal property. Although it took a decade of work, it is enshrined in Guatemalan jurisprudence, benefiting the entire population.

A similar law was enacted in the central African nation of Rwanda in the aftermath of that country's 1994 genocide, but that may have come too late to help many of the female survivors of that atrocity in which as many as one million people were killed. Some male relatives of victims had already claimed the land under older laws.

In Guinea recently, all adult refugees – men and women for the first time – were issued individual identity documents, giving the women far greater flexibility in such areas as food distributions and freedom of movement. That should become standard practice in any refugee community.

To meet the 'gender challenge' within humanitarian organizations themselves, greater numbers of women were recruited, specialized posts were created, sensitization programs developed for all staff and some budgets were rationalized to move nearer to equality.

VOICES: "Approximately one-third of Angolan households are headed by women who bear the burden of generating income as well as caring for their children. They have limited access to land, healthcare, education and other social services. They have no competitive skills and an increasing number of them opt for nocturnal lives on the streets."

Most humanitarian administrators, field staff and women refugees agree that more work needs to be done. But that appears to be the only point of convergence. There are sharp differences – often along gender lines – in judging the effectiveness of what has already been accomplished, how much more work is still necessary and what kind of nuts and bolts decisions and programs are needed to attain the lofty goals of genuine equality for refugees of both sexes.

One view suggests major strides have already been made with more effective international and national legislation to better protect women from sexual and other crimes, projects to improve their health, food and education in refugee camps and to give them a better chance to either win asylum or successfully restart their lives if they eventually return home.

However, while acknowledging the special problems faced by females, these advocates caution that the overall operational thrust of a humanitarian organization like UNHCR could become 'distorted' if too much emphasis was placed on 'special' programs for any particular group. Some high level officials believed too that it was 'patronizing' and 'counterproductive' to concentrate on women's projects, because this would suggest that women refugees were incapable of doing things for themselves. Similar arguments infused the debate in the United States in recent years about the desirability of affirmative action programs for black Americans.

Moreover, according to some officials, increased numbers of women had also been recruited into humanitarian organizations which themselves had undergone fundamental change toward gender issues.

Serge Malé, UNHCR's senior epidemiologist, recalls: "Fifteen years ago, refugee women were viewed through a one dimensional lens – as a mother. We did not see them as 'complete women' – complicated human beings with an array of potential problems, not just childbirth. We have moved on from there in our attitude toward women and such problems as sexual violence or genital mutilation. There has been progress."

VOICES: "Women are treated as helpless victims, rather than individuals who should be adequately consulted and informed on all decisions impacting their lives. This is reflected in political decisions taken by governments and humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR."

The debate can be heated. The contrarian view, shared by many uprooted women, acknowledges 'limited' rather than 'sweeping' progress in bettering the lot of refugees, criticizes some programs and reforms as superficial and even counterproductive, and paints a picture of continued ingrained bias against change.

"There remains a baffling level of resistance in the humanitarian community towards an approach that seeks gender equality," specialists Deborah Clifton and Fiona Gell wrote in a paper entitled Saving and Protecting Lives by Empowering Women. This stemmed from "a lack of understanding, skills and commitment to challenge discrimination which fundamentally reflects an inherent male bias," in the humanitarian world.

Female refugees can be victims many times over. During a long flight into exile they lose the support of their government, their homes and often their husbands. Women, sometimes illiterate and sometimes barely in their teens, overnight can become breadwinner, physical protector or nurse to an entire family. Even when they reach 'safety' they are often prey to sexual predators or bullying immigration officials.

But one of the most insidious and, in the long term, debilitating approaches in trying to help these women, according to field specialists, is to over emphasize programs concentrating on basic priorities like food and shelter.

While such projects are praiseworthy and necessary they come at a price – concentrating and prolonging the stereotype of the 'vulnerable' 'hapless' woman – but crucially underplaying so-called 'empowerment' projects which could provide them with better educational, economic and leadership skills and in turn enhance their roles in a camp or when they return home, rather than continuing to be second-class citizens.

One Afghan woman called Jamila echoed the frustration of refugee women repeatedly sidelined and overlooked when she told the recent U.N. Security Council meeting: "When you are looking for leaders, look to us. Do not think that because women wear a veil, we do not have a voice. I have often heard that Afghan women are not political; that peace and security is a man's work. I am here to challenge that illusion. For the last 20 years of my life, the leadership of men has only brought war and suffering."

"At the height of an emergency, with perhaps tens of thousands of people needing food and water immediately just to survive, we will save more lives and ensure that our initiatives will continue after the emergency if programs to help women in the long run are put in place from day one of a crisis," Joyce Mends-Cole, UNHCR' s senior coordinator for refugee women said.

VOICES: "All the women (at a refugee conference in Canada) agreed that immigration judges are insensitive to asylum seekers, especially female applicants. Most adjudicators are uninformed about issues affecting women... and did not have much knowledge regarding the country of origin."

Compounding any actual 'anti-female bias' is also the tricky issue of 'cultural bias' among refugees themselves and among the field staff trying to help them.

UNHCR, for instance, employs staff from around the world whose approach to any problem will be 'colored' to some degree by their own upbringing, whatever official guidelines are in place.

With the lives of refugees in turmoil, especially in the first days of a crisis, how far should aid agencies intervene in not only providing them with lifesaving food, water and shelter, but introducing programs which might alter the cultural balance of their societies?

Should girls and women, who at home may never have gone to school or made major family decisions, be taught to read and write and join refugee councils debating such weighty issues as food distribution, land distribution and returning home?

As a United Nations rights-based organization, UNHCR's overall policy is clear, but the 'bias battle' continues every day in the field.

One field supervisor refused to introduce a schooling program in one Middle Eastern country with the argument that educated women would find it difficult to get married and the comment that "I certainly wouldn't marry such a woman myself."

The issue of sanitary supplies to women has been a delicate issue, especially for male staff who are often reluctant to become involved or are simply ham-fisted. In one African town a male aide handed out supplies to girls in front of a mixed class. The teenagers were mortified.

Though the issue of such supplies has been official UNHCR policy for years, implementation remains patchy. "My God, I thought this problem had been resolved 15 years ago," one former field officer exclaimed when she heard that High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers had once more made the program a major priority.

In Guinea, home to hundreds of thousands of refugees, questions were raised at one camp about the safety and privacy of toilets and the need for a simple lock.

"These women are not Muslims," one harassed field official said. "Privacy is a luxury in crises."

Following repeated sexual attacks on Somali women in Kenyan refugee camps, camp layouts and lighting were improved and security tightened to try to eradicate the problem.

Such guidelines should be universal, but as Julie Mertus, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and professor at the American University in Washington D.C. noted recently "Nothing really changes."

In the current Afghan crisis, for instance, "Washrooms, latrines and wells in camps are still built on grid patterns that ignore the needs of women. They are poorly lit and unguarded."

Echoing the overworked official in Guinea quoted above, a longtime camp planner for Afghanistan commented: "This is an emergency. Everyone will get the same. There is no time for gender."

Just how wide the male-female divide can open was perhaps illustrated in the case of The Lost Children of Sudan (see separate story page 8). In the late 1980s many thousands of youngsters fled their homes in the south of that country because of years of civil war. They wandered the savannah for years, moving to Ethiopia, returning to Sudan before arriving at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

After their odyssey became widely known, the United States agreed to accept several thousand "lost boys" who became international celebrities as they started their new lives.

Girls suffered a different fate. Many were absorbed into foster homes where they became domestic servants and some entered arranged marriages. None were offered new lives abroad.

VOICES: "In 1981 when 452 boats arrived in Thailand carrying 15,479 refugees, UNHCR's statistics were a study of horror: 349 boats had been attacked an average of three times each; 578 women were raped, 228 women were abducted and 881 people were dead or missing."

Even well-meaning programs can have unexpected and, at times, tragic results. During the exodus of millions of boat people from Indochina following the end of the Viet Nam war, women became easy targets for pirates.

The United States earmarked millions of dollars for programs to improve their security and ensure that perpetrators were brought to justice. The results were tracked on what Christine Mougne now calls "that horrible map" in UNHCR's office in Bangkok, Thailand.

Each type of attack ranging from sexual violence to abductions and then murders was marked on the map by a different symbol. Initially, there appeared to be limited numbers of killings, but as more pirates were hauled into court for rape, so the number of boat people being abused and then coldbloodedly massacred and 'disappeared' into the sea climbed steeply. The symbols representing killings mushroomed across that map.

In Kenya, many women were raped as they scoured remote areas for fire

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 126: "Women – Seeking A Better Deal" (April 2002). Download the complete issue (pdf, 1.3Mb) here